On Tuesday, a bipartisan group proposed a bold, far-reaching and controversial solution to the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and clogged highways. After two years of research and negotiations, the panel recommended up to a 40-cent increase on the gas tax.
How did a collection of politicos find the courage to suggest such a politically hot solution? Quite easily, in fact: They’re not up for reelection. It was the work of a Blue Ribbon Commission.
Beginning in the 1970s and increasingly in the last decade, Congress has taken a pass on handling many complicated or controversial issues — from Medicare to veterans’ benefits to war — preferring instead to appoint a handful of retired, moderate statesmen to make recommendations that it will promptly ignore.
If Congress today was tasked with drafting the Bill of Rights, said frequent Blue Ribboner and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, “they’d probably set up a commission.”
We’re in the thick of the Blue Ribbon Commission Era, which presents a quintessential Washington Mystery: Who are all these commissioners? What in the name of Congress are they doing? And what does it say about government that it now routinely outsources the governing process?
The traffic commission report is illustrative. Faced with crumbling roads and bridges and maddening traffic congestion in 2005, Congress decided that rather than hold hearings and work on legislation, it would establish the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission.
The commission lost control early and ended with a 10-car pileup. Hamilton, who’s been doing the Blue Ribbon shuffle since the Carter administration, said that “the stature of the people who serve is terribly important.” The transportation committee could boast of no former senators or ambassadors and was stocked with unknown business leaders whose industries stood to benefit. The chairwoman, Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, didn’t have the necessary quality of having retired.
Commissioners go to great lengths, said Hamilton (Iraq Study Group; 9-11 Commission) and former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey (9/11 Commission), to prevent a dissenting report. In Peters’ unusual case, she was the author of a dissent, signed by two other Republicans, meaning her own committee out-voted her.
Even commissions that don’t go this far off the rails, however, generally don’t end up arriving anywhere, leaving their recommendations lost in transit. Often, that’s just fine with the Congress that established it. Within hours, Republican Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri, whose Congress had originally created the transportation commission, was ripping its 40-cent tax proposal in a press release.
The icy congressional greeting differed markedly from the one given the much-heralded Social Security commission from the 1980s. “It was almost guaranteed to get attention,” said Hamilton, citing its chairmen, future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a former Democratic senator and ambassador to the United Nations. Their stature and bipartisan regard gave both Democrats and Republicans the cover needed to make difficult reforms.
That effort is the envy of Blue Ribboners and was cited as a model of success by every serial commissioner spoken to for this article. That’s because it’s one of a kind. In general, commissions are little more than a symptom of government overwhelmed.
“[President Herbert] Hoover did a commission on how you restructure the federal government, but I think in recent years we’ve seen more commissions. Part of the reason is the dysfunction within the system,” said Leon Panetta (Iraq Study Group), another member of the commission circuit. “There’s a lack of willingness on both sides to find consensus, to sit down and try to figure out what needs to be done. Normally that’s how government is supposed to work.”
In the past, said Hamilton, “I don’t really recall commissions like the Iraq Study Group or 9/11. It does raise questions about the capacity of Congress to do oversight, and maybe even disturbing questions. You would think that looking into intelligence failures surrounding a terrorist attack would be something Congress would handle.”
Of course, Hamilton’s been there and understands the complexity of congressional work. And, they say, it’s only increased since he first arrived on the Hill. “Let’s just take agriculture,” he said of his time in Congress in the ’60s. “I had three or four groups that lobbied you with regard to the Farm Bill. Today you’ve got 50.”
Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Princeton University, dated the rise of commissions to the collapse of the committee system in the ’70s. “In the ’50s and ’60s, congressional committees served the role that Blue Ribbon Commissions do now. There was bipartisan compromise and a certain amount of secrecy. Then the committee system broke apart in the ’70s, and I don’t think it was a coincidence that in the ’80s you had the Social Security commission,” he said.
“I’m not sure how effective [commissions] are,” he added. “Ultimately, a commission is not a committee.” In other words, it doesn’t have the power to mark up legislative language and move it to the floor.
Kerrey and the other commissioners were quick to point out the limits of the exercise. “Commissions can be one of two things: a way to avoid a problem, or a mechanism to address a problem that couldn’t be addressed otherwise,” Kerrey said.
The problem with solving a problem through a commission is that the report can melt under the political heat. “The reality is that knowledge is powerful in politics, but politics is much more powerful than knowledge,” Zelizer said. He pointed to the health care task force that then-first-lady Hillary Rodham Clinton led and a 2001 Social Security commission as examples of commission compromises that wilted under the political light of day.
Often, there’s nobody left to shade it from the heat. “It requires significant follow-through,” Panetta said. “Everybody gets out of town. Nothing happens. There are few funds made available to try to say to the chairman and some staff, ‘We’re going to keep you in place for a year to implement this, to lobby Congress.’” When that happens, as it did with an oceans commission Panetta was on and with the 9/11 Commission, results are achievable. But it’s hard work for no pay and little reward.
Often, it involves reading classified documents in secure locations, which means travel and time away from home. For somebody like Panetta, who lives in California, it requires a lot of cross-country flights in coach seating (though he said he often uses his frequent flier miles to upgrade).
It’s difficult to explain to someone not deeply ingrained in the capital’s culture why anyone would bother to take part. “It’s a standing joke with my wife that if I come home with one more commission without pay, she’s going to take drastic action — divorce or something,” Hamilton said.
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